NordicHardware scored an exclusive review of the Asus P5Q3 Deluxe motherboad and they seem to like it a lot. Although they didn't have time to test every aspect of the board, the P45 chipset seems to be working properly on all accounts now, and this is indeed good news, as it's less than a month until the official launch.

The new chipset doesn't add much in terms of performance, although it seems to be very close to Intel's X48 chipset in most of the benchmarks on test, which could potentially be bad news for Intel, as people might choose to go for the cheaper chipset due to the small performance differences.

The P5Q3 Deluxe supports DDR3 memory and comes with Asus' USB 802.11 pre-N WiFi card, has a pair of dual x16 PCIe 2.0 slots, although as per all P45 motherboards these are limited to x8 bandwidth when both slots are being used. This is also the first motherboard we know of that features a 16-phase PWM, which seems somewhat over the top.

They also managed to overclock the FSB to 500MHz using a QX9770 which isn't exactly the most overclocking friendly processor, but they didn't have a dual-core CPU at hand and hope to post an update with some dual-core overclocking results. The downside is the fairly high asking price of €199, which seems too steep for what is meant to be a upper mid-range consumer chipset-based motherboard.

You can read the full review here